Page 3 of Crowned By the Fae King

"Great spirit, will you listen to me?" I asked in Vietnamese. "You saved me. Helped me. Will you let me help the people caught in your forest?"

I knew the force that had changed the land could understand my tongues of birth. Of course it could. I could feel it inside me, like roots had grown into my soul.

Maybe that was stupid. What did I know about magic? Maybe it couldn't hear me at all. I wasn't a particularly dedicated practitioner of religion, and I didn't know shit about Faery. The fae weren't that interested in giving their slaves lessons about their culture, and none of us had possessed much of a desire to listen, anyway. We wanted out, not to learn how to assimilate.

I wracked my brain, trying to remember the things Auntie and Bà had taught me about ghosts and spirits, which was the closest thing to information I had. Vietnam wasn't Faery, but these worlds were connected. Maybe the old religions all knew the truth, somewhere far in the past: there was another world, and it was inhabited by things far stranger than us mere mortals.

Bà would have been so much better at this. I had no idea how to propitiate a faery spirit, let alone a faery Court. I didn't have any food or alcohol, or even a paper representation to burn. Blood, maybe?

But, no. It had healed me—every part of me. I was breathing easily, not even tired, with only the scent of smoke and burned hair lingering on me as proof that I'd been in that building at all.

All my skin felt hypersensitized, the adrenaline pounding through me making me tremble. The forest was still too dark to see, but I didn't think that would matter. Faery was alive, and if I closed my eyes, it pressed into me, the knowledge of a world that spread far beyond the small circle of land I'd grown familiar with.

I stood, and gave the forest a deep bow. It would let me in, or it wouldn't. If it didn't… well, I should be dead, anyway. Maybe in my next life, I could do better than I had this time.

Eyes closed, I stepped into the black of the forest.

Faery swallowed me whole. I could feel it, all around me, hungry and aware. Trees stretched their roots ever deeper and branches ever higher. Stone slumbered underfoot, ancient and inviolable. Small creatures crept out of hiding. To my right, a songbird lifted his voice in defiance of the night, singing to flame instead of the sun. To my left, a woman sobbed, trapped by a tree.

I walked towards her. The tree had grown around her, swallowing her like the mine had swallowed people, or like a tree eating the wire of a chain-link fence. She had one arm and her shoulders free, and one foot protruding from the bark.

"Gina," I whispered, recognizing my bunkmate by the bright pink hair plastered to her pale skin by the rain.

She picked her head up with the exhaustion of a dog beaten half to death. "Q?" she asked, her voice wavering.

My mouth pressed into a flat line. I hated being called by my initial instead of my name. It wasn't as if "Quyen" was a hard name to say. I much preferred hearing Luke say "Kwahn" with exaggerated care than getting called "Q." At least he was trying.

I didn't reprimand her, though. She'd been eaten by a tree.

"Yeah, it's me," I said, stepping closer. I had no idea how to help her. My belt-knife wasn't nearly big enough to hack through a tree, and I suspected that taking steel to this particular forest was a very, very bad idea.

I came over, though, and put my hand on the tree, closing my eyes to see if the spirit of the Court would talk to me. A sense of discomfort settled in my gut, as if I'd eaten something off. Trees weren't meant to have people in them any more than they were meant to have chain-link fences in them. It was doing its best, growing around the thing inside it, but Gina's presence was like a tumor, or a cyst.

"What are you doing?" she asked, sounding like she was on the verge of crying again. "You have to cut me out. You have to—"

"Shh," I said, frowning as I tried to listen. "I'm thinking."

Gina whimpered like an injured puppy, hanging there, trapped.

Not a knife, I thought, my brows pulling together. The forest still seemed to respond to me, though. The tree almost leaned into me, listening to me, a gentle sort of focus. Maybe my hands.

"Listen to me, Gina," I said, trying to sound soothing. "The Court is awake, okay? It woke up. I don't know why. I think it's falling asleep again? Or… I don't know. But it's still listening, and I'm going to try to talk to it."

"Is that some kind of… Asian magic?" she asked, half-whimpering the words.

I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. I ought to just leave her here. That would serve her right.

I remembered Auntie telling me, one of the many times I got frustrated with dealing with some asshole or another, "If helping the ignorant was easy, everyone would be a buddha." Gina wasn't an asshole. She was a spoiled rich white girl who'd gotten picked up wandering home drunk from a frat party, agreeing to go home with the hot guy she'd met and do anything he told her to do. Nobody had ever bothered to teach her how to be a decent person.

"I think it's faery magic," I said, when I could keep the irritation out of my voice. "I want you to lean forward, okay?"

"Okay," she said, her voice shaking. "Just… just get me out of here, Q."

I crouched in front of her. "Yeah," I said, absently, focusing not on her but on the tree. "Spirit," I murmured softly, using Vietnamese again. It had worked before. "Let me remove the thorn in your side."

There was no way for me to tell if it was listening. That first, overwhelming wave of knowledge and connection had ebbed, and what remained felt tenuous. Distant, maybe. It tugged to the north, and a little west, as if my heart beat outside of my chest, far in the distance.

"Lean forward," I told Gina.

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